"But is it quite certain that they were married?" asked Phyllis, with all the premature knowledge of a country clergyman's daughter. "If they were not legally married, this man could not take your place."
Philip dropped the hand he still held. She had struck hard upon a chord in his nature which vibrated under her touch in utter discordance. Now and then she had jarred slightly upon him, and he had hastened to forget it, but here was a discord that would turn all his life's music into harshness.
"Phyllis, you do not know what you are saying," he cried.
"Oh! yes, I do," she answered, half petulantly and half playfully. "It is not likely that your father would marry a girl like Sophy Goldsmith. And if he did not, you will still be the heir, and some day I shall be Mrs. Martin of Brackenburn."
Philip walked on beside her in silence, his eyes fixed on the ground.
"That is the first thing to find out," continued Phyllis shrewdly. "I don't believe there was a legal marriage, or if there was, the Goldsmith's must prove it. Of course, your mother will be very mad about it for a while, but it will come right in the end; and 'All's well that ends well,' you know. But isn't it strange that, after all these years, we should find out about Sophy Goldsmith? And your father knew all along, the naughty, naughty man!"
So smooth hitherto had been the current of their short lives that Philip had never seen Phyllis in any circumstances of great trouble or difficulty. She was still a young girl, and how shame or sorrow would affect her no one could have foretold. But at this crisis, with all his own nature overwrought with shame for his father and sorrow for his mother, he felt how vast was the distance between them. They were dwelling in different worlds. Was it a premonition of this disparity between them which had made his mother oppose their marriage?
He turned back abruptly toward the hotel, and they did not talk much on their way. Phyllis's brain was busy, too busy for much speaking. If this terrible thing could possibly be true—though she rejected such a supposition—then, indeed, she must bid farewell to all the bright schemes she had laid for her future life. Philip would be a poor nobody, and she really was not fitted to be a poor man's wife. She loved him, of course, and it would be intense misery to give him up. How she could part from him she did not know; her mother must manage it for her, if the necessity ever arose. But to be plain Mrs. Martin, of nowhere in particular, living on a few hundreds a year! That would be impossible. Still, what folly it was to be looking forward to things which would never happen! She turned a bright face to Philip as he left her at the hotel door.
"Take courage, and be comforted," she said. "It has all got to be proved first."
He turned away with a feeling of utter discouragement. All his world seemed shaken to its very foundations. His father had been guilty of a deed of the deepest baseness, and his intended wife was blind to that baseness. But he had no time for musing on it. Dorothy's voice arrested him, and, looking up, he saw her coming quickly to him, dressed as for a journey. Her face was troubled, and she spoke to him in imploring tones.